“Let’s put LSD in this small town’s drinking water and see what happens.”
“What scientific purpose would this have?”
“It would be funny.”
“Good point. Operation Midnight Climax approved.”
Don’t threaten me with a good time
Being unknowingly dosed with an unknown psychedelic is NOT a good time.
I can’t find the part about spiking a small town’s drinking water in that article.
Thanks. That sure is messed up.
It’s also kind of a fringe theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1951_Pont-Saint-Esprit_mass_poisoning
The attribution of the poisoning to the CIA in Albarelli’s book has been roundly criticized. Historian Steven Kaplan, author of an earlier book about the events, said that this would be “clinically incoherent: LSD takes effects in just a few hours, whereas the inhabitants showed symptoms only after 36 hours or more. Furthermore, LSD does not cause the digestive ailments or the vegetative effects described by the townspeople.”
To be clear: I have no reason to believe that the CIA circa 1951 wouldn’t or couldn’t pull this kind of stunt, just that the evidence that they in fact did is pretty shaky.
This is a direct consequence of Conway’s law. You create an organisation with the mission of deceiving and abusing, don’t be surprised if they produce deception and abuse.
Huh, well this is one of those things I’m going to see everywhere now
Melvin Conway and Hannah Arendt probably could have had a really fascinating with each other comparing ideas in computer and political sciences
I had to do some serious convincing to inform my mom about the CIA’s involvement in Contra cocaine trafficking.
That’s the best thing about the stuff that the CIA has done: they publicly admit to it in writing and people still refuse to believe it’s true
The ultimate conspiracy theory… The CIA is manufacturing conspiracy theories so that their actual, admitted, documented conspiracies are dismissed reflexively for sounding insane
Straight up just listening to Behind the Bastards/It Could Happen Here, the Dollop, or Knowledge Fight will make you sound like a crazy person if you talk about them to someone who has no interest in history or current events
Thankfully, there’s a wiki page
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been the subject of a number of controversies…
God, what a fitting start/title.
Resignation of officials and agents who would not work for Donald Trump
I didn’t think I would come away with my opinion of the CIA improved.
For the rep they get, they actually do objectively more good than bad. It’s just that you’ll never hear about most the good and the bad sometimes tends to get extraordinarily bad. That’s just how it works, it’s why they were founded.
You are being watched. The government has a secret system, a machine that spies on you every hour of every day. I know because I built it. I designed the machine to detect acts of terror, but it sees everything. Violent crimes involving ordinary people, people like you. Crimes the government considered irrelevant. They wouldn’t act, so I decided I would. But I needed a partner, someone with the skills to intervene. Hunted by the authorities, we work in secret. You’ll never find us. But victim or perpetrator, if your number’s up, we’ll find you.
On a similar note, I get irate when people call the Business Plot a conspiracy theory. It’s just a conspiracy. We know it happened.
CIA is everything Hollywood movies depict terrorists and evil organizations to be.
Either the CIA is very good at it and no other countries can match them at toppling a regime, or they’re really sloppy and we only know about it because of it, plus other large nations are doing it better than them without raising suspicion.
It’s just high, high volume. You swing at every pitch and you’re statistically bound to eventually hit some home runs. The CIA is always up to some shit.
The fun part is the shit you can’t talk about without disappearing.
Good times, good times.
It’s been 7 hours. You still here?
casual_turtle_stew_enjoyer is fine, he just can’t come to the Internet right now. 👍